Chapter Eight Tom
Chapter Eight
Tom
Tom had meant to google what a ceilidh was before he turned up outside the school that evening to meet Daisy. He’d heard the word, he just didn’t know exactly what it involved.
Daisy walked toward him, smiling, as he rested against the wall outside, his backpack of camera equipment at his feet.
“You ready?” Daisy asked, and Tom wasn’t sure why she had such a big smile on her face. “It’s just you and me. Clara had to
stay late at work. Some audio’s gone missing for our top story for tomorrow.”
“How do you already know your top story for tomorrow?” Tom asked, frowning. “That makes no sense to me.”
Daisy laughed. “It’s just a good bit from an interview she did that we’re saving for over the weekend, in the hope we don’t
then get called into the office. Perfect footwear by the way.”
Tom glanced down at his shiny white trainers and looked up, frowning. “Why?”
Daisy started walking away and toward the hall. “You do know what a ceilidh is, right?” she said, turning back. Tom shrugged, following her toward the double doors at the top of
the steps.
The moment Daisy pushed the doors open, Tom realized what he’d gotten himself into.
He could almost feel the heat from the bodies falling like an invisible blanket over his head as a band played on the stage and groups of people were swinging their way around the room.
He scanned the hall, trying to understand what was going on.
A ceilidh, it seemed, was a high energy Scottish gathering (he was guessing from the kilts) with live music and a lot of very specific dancing involving many limbs at once.
Everyone was mirroring each other’s moves, often while laughing their heads off.
Tom focused on projecting an “ally energy” as he watched. He wasn’t entirely sure what that energy looked like, so he decided
he wouldn’t meet anyone’s eye and would only approach people if they approached him.
Within ten minutes as sweat poured from his head and he spun around the room, clasping hands with a stranger, all his rules
went out the window. He’d spent minutes of the first dance muttering apologies to any woman he was told to grab by the waist
or hold onto by the arm, but it was futile. Either they were moving so fast they couldn’t hear him, or they were so focused
on getting the moves right that they didn’t care.
“For this one, you’ll need to partner up with one person,” the instructor said as the band set about tuning up fiddles and
accordions and guitars.
Daisy met Tom’s eye from two partners down, shrugged and walked toward him.
“How are you finding it?”
He ran the back of his hand across his forehead. “I’m very much struggling to believe that this is what it will take to get Sophie back.”
Daisy’s eyes lit up as she laughed. “You never know . . .”
“Okay! So take both your partner’s hands,” the instructor said before Tom could continue his rant about hot sweaty ceilidhs.
Daisy held hers out, palms facing up, and Tom looked down at them.
She had very slender fingers, bare except for the engagement ring, the silver of which he could see shining under the fluorescent lights of the school hall they were in.
He rolled his shoulders back and placed his hands on top of hers, nodding. How was she not sweating? He was fairly sure his
palms were moist if not wet by now and he pulled them away, rubbing them on his jeans before returning them. When he looked
up, Daisy was watching him, the corners of her mouth twitching.
“Pull your partner toward you and away again,” the instructor on stage said and Tom did as he was told, gently squeezing Daisy’s
hands as they moved close, chests almost touching before stepping backward. “Now you need to keep hold of one hand and move
to stand side by side as though you’re going for a walk.”
The instructor stopped for a second, leaning away from the microphone to cough. “Sorry,” she croaked. “Water,” she added,
before wandering off to the edge of the stage.
Everyone stood, waiting. Tom looked down at Daisy’s hand still resting in his. Should he let go? He didn’t want to cause any
offence by dropping her hand the moment he could, but he didn’t know if it was weird to keep holding it when the lesson had
paused. He didn’t dare look across at Daisy. If she was thinking the same thing, he couldn’t sense it in her hand. It rested
in his as though it were a perfectly normal way to stand with a man who you’d met on the bus and only started hanging out
with after he got smacked in the face. His heart started beating faster.
“Sorry about that,” the instructor said, returning to the stage. “Okay so you’re going to walk forward two steps, then back
two steps . . .” It took a long time for his heart rate to slow, but that had to be the surprise cardio. Definitely not anything
else.
At one point Tom’s watch asked him if he wanted to record an indoor run, that’s how high energy a ceilidh was.
The thing he enjoyed the most about it was that it was near impossible not to smile while doing it.
Each jig meant that whether he wanted to or not, he would sort of hop rather than walk, his knees rising with the beat.
And as he swapped partners and spun his way around the school hall his face broke into a grin, his neck muscles at the back of his head aching through the strain.
“I’m going to sit this one out. Take some pictures,” he said when he refound Daisy after the last dance. He pulled his camera
out of his bag which was sitting at the side of the hall and put it around his neck, noticing, as he always did, the familiar
weight of it. It was the first time in months that Tom had picked up his camera outside of a studio. He used to take it everywhere
with him, as though if he had his camera around his neck, he had a reason to be there.
He lifted the Canon up to his eye, his right hand on the shutter and his left on the lens. He took a few steps to the side,
twisting his left hand until Daisy came into focus. She was leaning her head back, laughing as she and her three partners
got the move entirely wrong, hands in the middle and skipping clockwise when it was supposed to be anticlockwise. He pressed
his finger down, taking frame after frame of Daisy, eyes sparkling as the light caught her face, shining against her right
cheekbone.
He pulled his camera away from his face, staring down at the screen to flick through the pictures he’d taken, eyes squinting
slightly as such a different version to bus Daisy appeared. A rush of energy ran up his body. This is what it felt like when
he took a good photo. This was the feeling he’d been missing since he started taking on nonstop editorial work. There was
less magic in those shoots. He’d forgotten that in different environments he knew right away when he’d captured something
perfectly. It wasn’t necessarily that he could see it, but he could feel it. It were as though the moment was bigger than him, and he just happened to be the person holding the camera.
Walking around the room, he started taking more and more pictures, making sure to keep his camera up high and to focus on
faces. Wild hair, red cheeks and glistening foreheads, eyes that shone and toothy grins on display. He was in the zone now.
Everything else around him faded into the background. Aside from the subjects he was pointing his camera at, the rest was
a blur, the music now just a gentle hum. There was so much joy in the room and he was just happy to be present for it. Click
went his camera as one girl in a Big Uterus Energy T-shirt spun around the room, cackling. He was so into it that when the
music finally stopped, it felt a little like he’d been shocked, his body fizzing. He hadn’t felt like that in a long time.
Maybe years.
Daisy appeared beside him.
“I’m a feminist but . . .” she said. “If I have to do one more dance, I will die.” She held out her phone. “Shall I take a photo of you so we can leave?”
Tom frowned, staring at her phone. His brain was still back on the scene he’d just shot of three women, all wearing Fueled
by Caffeine and Feminist Rage singlets, their face expressing the direct opposite of rage.
“For your . . . Instagram?” she prompted. “For Sophie.”
“Fuck! Yes. Of course,” Tom said, putting down his camera and running a hand through his hair. He’d completely forgotten,
for a moment, why he was there.
Later, back at his one-bed flat he and Sophie used to share, Tom stared at his Instagram notifications, waiting. He knew it
was ridiculous, but Daisy’s certainty that it was worth a shot had somehow merged into something else by the time he got home.
Something closer to hope.
He’d posted the photos after 11:00 p.m. after going through all the ones he’d taken, editing and posting a selection of his favorites.
It was a stupid time to do it. Sophie religiously went to bed at 10:00 p.m., but he didn’t want to rush it.
He wanted to choose the very best ones he took.
He’d put the photo Daisy took of him amongst them all, as some sort of throwaway that wasn’t important.
So what that he’d been there; it was about the other photos.
The comment icon appeared and he immediately clicked on it.
These are fantastic, mate. Some of your best!
It was Ralph, ever the cheerleader of Tom’s photography career.
The likes and comments started to ramp up quickly.
There he is!
Yes, mate!
So. Much. Joy.
Bloody love a ceilidh!
When the likes reached over fifty, Tom stared down at his phone, looking again at the images one by one.
He hadn’t used any of Daisy. For some reason that felt too personal, even though they were definitely his best. The others weren’t far off though.
There was something so special about seeing that much joy on people’s faces.
It wasn’t often you got to see strangers that happy.
It was like being invited into a secret club, and just looking at them made Tom feel happy too.
Happier than he’d felt in a really long time.
Squinting, he flicked back and forth through the photos, an idea forming.
He was so used to being booked to take professional shots of models and actors he’d forgotten how much he loved shooting strangers.
Not only strangers, but those in-between moments he’d been thinking about before.
The moments where people lost their inhibitions and their guards came down.
The idea began to take shape. What if he set himself a project, just for fun?
He could start trying to take photos of people being joyful.
He could carry his camera on his early bus journeys and jump off somewhere different each time, see what he found.
Wasn’t it better than feeling uninspired?
A heart appeared at the top of the screen. SophieGreenlees. Tom’s heart thumped so hard against his chest that he wouldn’t be surprised if his shirt shot forward like they did in old
cartoons. She’d seen his post. She’d seen it at . . . 11:38 p.m. Just as quickly as he was filled with delight at Sophie having
seen it, something else took its place. Worry. Panic. Because why? Why was she up so late? She’d only be up this late if she’d
been out for some reason. Say . . . on a date. Now he was the one worrying about her moving on. Was this whole plan to get her back too late? It felt so unfair that he couldn’t just ask her. That he wasn’t
allowed to just send her a message, checking in on whether he should keep trying.
Her first Instagram comment since they broke up.
These are beautiful, Tom.